**Today in GigaScience we present the genome of the tegu lizard. It is the most complete assembly of any reptile genome so far and will also aid scientists to study other lizards and snakes. ** The tegu has mastered a trick that is highly unusual in the reptile world: it can turn on its own heating system.

In GigaScience , Benjamin Makepiece and his co-authors from Liverpool present genome assemblies of two trombidid mite species, the itch-inducing chigger mite and its more benign cousin, the velvet mite.  The bite of the chigger mite can transmit a life-threatening bacterial disease, scrub typhus.

This is the Dawning of the Age of Aequatus Our ICG Prize is over now for another year, and we’ll shortly follow up with an announcement on which of the six winners won the $1000 first prize. To help you see how great all the entries were we will introduce and profile some of the winning papers.

As an Open Science journal, one of the main aims of GigaScience is to break down barriers. Both in the access of research and the underlying data and code supporting it, and the barriers holding back the researchers themselves.

This year we have two posters at the SfN meeting in sunny San Diego, Ca. The first poster is on Sunday morning, Nov.

On the occasion of the first “BigDataDay” at our university, I have summarized on the below poster our two main efforts to automate the publication of our tiny raw data. On the left is our project automating Buridan data deposition at FigShare using the ROpenSci plugin and the consequence of just sending the links to the data and the evaluation code to a publisher, instead of pixel-based figures, when submitting a paper.

View towards the National Wine Centre of Australia (conference venue) from the Adelaide Botanic Garden Having just attended our first plant phenomics conference – it was great to learn how far the field has progressed and how rapidly it continues to progress with the advancement of new technologies for high-throughput phenotyping.

Navigating Pangenome’s Labyrinth In the two decades since the first genomes were sequenced, with the exponential growth of new and closely related genomes it has become increasingly difficult to visualise and compare their structure. Particularly with the large diversity and difference in genes within microbial genomes.

Photo: UNSW Sydney The cane toad Rhinella marina is native to Central and South America. But thanks to humans and the sugar cane trade, the species now thrives also in Australia and other places where it doesn’t belong. The invasive species comes with an unpleasant surprise for native Australian predators, such as snakes or freshwater crocodiles: R. marina kills them with its toxic secretions.

The recent publication of the “Ten Principles of Plan S” has sparked numerous discussions among which one of several recurring themes was academic freedom. The cause for these discussions is the insistence of the funders supporting Plan S that their grant recipients only publish in certain venues under certain liberal licensing schemes.